🔹 Next week CCC turns 2 years old! Some fun announcements coming and a refreshed layout as well - be sure to open next week’s CCC email!

🔹 Congrats to last week’s Comment Contest winner J.B. - see his winning comment below today’s poll. Vote and comment for your chance to win next week!

Dear readers, Bandits in the Bushes taught us that leaving valuables unattended on a golf course is a bad idea. Bandits in the Bushes II brought the same lesson to Palm Springs.

This story also comes from the Coachella Valley.

The difference is that nobody left anything unattended. Three masked men simply walked onto the fairway with guns and took it.

This was the early 2000s, a good decade before anyone settled a bet with a phone, at a Coachella Valley club with the kind of gate-and-hedge pedigree where the practice facility is nicer than most public courses' entire property. For years the club had hosted a weekly money game with significant stakes. The kind of stakes that drew touring pros through the offseason. 

The custom was simple and, in hindsight, wildly exposed. Wins got paid on the spot. Presses stacked hole-by-hole. By the back nine on a big day, it wasn't unusual for a player to be carrying a fold of hundreds thick enough that you knew which pocket it was in.

Everybody in the game knew how it worked. The hole-by-hole cash payouts were the whole point of playing in it.

It happened, appropriately enough, on thirteen. The hole ran tight against a row of trees and the undeveloped scrub beyond the property line, one of the few places on the course where a group was completely out of sight of the clubhouse and everyone in it.

The group had just settled a press when three men came out of the trees. Masked, and armed with what our source said were machine guns. Full-auto or not, nobody standing in the middle of the fairway stopped to check calibers.

There was no ambiguity about what they wanted. One man kept the group still, one went pocket to pocket and the third watched the tree line behind them. They didn't touch the clubs. They didn't take their watches. They took the cash that had just changed hands and the cash that hadn't yet, and they were back into the trees within two minutes.

Whether the robbers appreciated the symbolism of the hole number is unknown.

The round was over. The group went straight in and reported it, but by the time anyone had police on the line, the crew was long gone, swallowed up by the desert wind, or if you prefer the version that made the rounds afterward, already out on the I-10 headed for Phoenix or L.A.

What bothered people afterward wasn't only that three armed men could find their way onto the property. It was how much they seemed to know once they got there.

They knew which club to hit. They knew which day and which group. They knew the game was played for real money, and that the money moved during the round rather than after it, in cash. They knew where the course went quiet and how to get in and out of it without anyone at the gate ever knowing they'd been there at all.

Three men do not randomly hop a fence onto a private course in masks, carrying weapons, and hope a foursome happens to be carrying several thousand dollars. Someone had told them, tipped them off, or simply let something slip in the wrong company. Who, exactly, nobody has ever said. A disgruntled employee, a caddie who knew about the game, a member's guest who talked too much, or just an overheard conversation at the wrong bar. Our source doesn't know either. What he does know is that whoever tipped them off gave them exactly what they needed.

The club's response was to make sure as few people as possible ever had to answer for any of it. Members were told, in the gentle but unmistakable way clubs deliver these instructions, that this was not a story that needed retelling. Not to spouses, not to other clubs and certainly not to anyone carrying a press badge.

It isn't hard to see why. An armed robbery on club property meant police reports, reporters, questions about security and the deeply undesirable prospect of the outside world learning exactly how much cash moved around during a Tuesday money game. Silence was cheaper than the alternative, and clubs, as we've established, are good at silence.

As far as our source knows, nobody was ever arrested and nothing ever amounted to much of an investigation, though whether that's because the police never got anywhere or because nobody at the club seemed especially eager to keep the matter alive is a distinction that twenty-plus years of institutional quiet have made impossible to untangle. What we do know is that it took this long, and one member finally deciding the statute of limitations on silence had run out, for the story to reach us at all.

So, dear readers, here's the thing about a place like this. Country clubs spend enormous sums creating the illusion that nothing from the outside world can get through the gates. But sometimes the outside world simply walks out of the trees on thirteen carrying guns.

Bandits in the Bushes taught us not to leave valuables exposed. Part II taught us the thieves might already be inside the gates. This one offers a different lesson entirely.

Sometimes the gates aren't protecting you from anything.

What told you the most about Thistlewood?

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Who got called “Sir” (9)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Who got sent around back (10)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 What the GM said (126)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ The lack of consequences (28)

Lots of votes on this one, and almost all of them were for the GM! Can’t say we disagree with that. Congrats to J.B. for winning the Comment Contest for saying, “In this case, GM stands for Gross Mismanagement!” A sleeve of LA GOLF balls are on their way J.B.!

Don’t forget to catch up on past stories at ccconfidential.vip - and while you’re at it, tell a friend!

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